Started my Nth teach-myself to code project this week. The project is taking a ‘simple’ GTK 1.x application and trying to port it to GTK 2.x. Gotten further than my previous attempts already, but I have to admitt I have spent more time getting the build system cleaned up than I have looking at the actual code.

So even if also this attempt at learning to code fails at least I have learned much about the GNU build scripts. I have to admit that before this attempt the autogen.sh, Makefile.am, Makefile.in, Makefile, Configure.in, configure and their relationship with eachother was somewhat voodoo to me. Can’t call myself a buildsystem master like thomasvs yet, but at least I have some understanding on how they all relate now. Havoc’s book on GTK+ and GNOME developer featured a nice chapter on it which got me started and if there are others out there wanting a quick intro on the GNU buildscripts I suggest checking out that book (it is available for free in html format from developer.gnome.org).

Anyway having spent some time now fixing the buildtree and buildsystem I have now gotten to a point where the application is actually trying (and somewhat succeding to build against gtk+ 2.0). Hopefully I manage to get it to compile fully by the end of the week and through that process have gotten a little more understanding of how GTK+ coding is supposed to be done.